OpenText is placing a major emphasis on the cloud with upcoming Release 16 of its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) suite, expanding a partnership with Google’s cloud division, including integrating its own products with Google’s G Suite brand applications.

“We’re not interested in kind of generic clouds that don’t add value, we want to go to cloud providers that make innovative sense,” explained chief executive officer and chief technical officer Mark Barrenechea.

“And Google’s a great example of where we can get to a transcription, translation services, deeper integration, and click stream for supply chain customers and have their Google Cloud Platform as an option for customers.”

OpenText is putting Google forward as its preferred partner for enterprise cloud, and Google has selecting OpenText as its preferred partner for EIM.

A number of Open Text’s applications will be made available on Google’s cloud platform, Anthos. Similarly, Google’s G Suite applications such as Drive, Sheets and Hangouts will be integrated with Open Text’s enterprise management software. Open Text will also integrate artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities from Alphabet Inc.’s Google into its own software.

“Customers are increasingly interested in moving critical EIM workloads to Google Cloud,” Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud’s corporate vice president of global ecosystem, said in a statement. “We’re expanding our partnership with OpenText to help our joint customers migrate these workloads more quickly and effectively

OpenText first said it would bring its services to Google Cloud in November. 

This doesn’t mean that on-premises deployments will be forcibly replaced. Barrenechea promised that the company would support on-premises environments as long as customers demand it. And they will continue with traditional licensing until they migrate to cloud, at which point pricing switches to a subscription model.

“Shift happens,” Barrenechea noted during his keynote at the frim’s annual user conference. “Shift has happened, and it’s an exciting time. We have transitioned. We’re not in the digital era anymore, we are beyond digital. We are in a post-ERP era; we are in the information era. Automation is not enough. Everything must be machine-readable.”

That includes signatures. Later this year, electronic signatures will be added to OpenText Core. “It’s a feature inside of Content Suite,” he said. “It’s not a company. E-signatures is a feature that should be in the product line.”

Later he told media that the e-signatures are part of the capability set designed to win the enterprise from Box and Dropbox.

“Box and Dropbox, they’re a feature, I’ve said it all along,” he said. “We are competitive, we’re going after them hard in the enterprise. Core collab is there, plus workflow, plus forms, now electronic signature, integrated in. We’re taking no quarter here, there’s no rest and no quarter against Box and Dropbox. It’s all out of battle to win that space and OpenText is going to win.”

OpenText has also launched OpenText Intelligent Capture, the rebranded, next-generation of OpenText Captiva, introducing new artificial intelligence and process automation capabilities. In addition, OpenText is also launching Core Capture, a SaaS capture solution based on its cloud based capture services and delivered on OpenText OT2.